For some reason, I watch a lot of competitive cooking shows, especially things like Top Chef, Chopped, Cutthroat Kitchen, and Guy's Grocery Games. For Anime Boston's food theme in 2020/2022, I decided to do an opening sort of parodying cooking shows in general. It's cute and silly, but man, I'm a terrible actor.
Video: Original Work
Audio: Bensound.com - Little Idea
Completed May 2022
YouTube Link
I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who for a long time, and my favorite post-reboot Doctor has always been David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor (Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor is still my favorite overall). I originally envisioned this video as including the entire history of the show, but the amount of footage, combined with the lack of good quality footage of the early Doctors had me pare it back to focusing on the Tenth Doctor’s era, with small nods to his predecessors.
The song is one that stuck in my head from the first time I heard it, and I always thought that it spoke to the idea of what we leave behind and how we’re remembered by others, which fit very well with how Tennant’s departure was played in his final episodes.
I was surprised as I was editing with just how many defining moments of the series were done with just reaction shots of characters, especially of Tennant, and that ended up being how the video flowed, which unfortunately made it pretty inaccessible to people who weren’t familiar with the series. Overall, it’s a fun tribute to the era, and I’m glad it came together pretty well.
Video - Doctor Who
Audio - Trans-Siberian Orchestra - What is Eternal (from Beethoven's Last Night)
Completed February 2022
This was a silly semi-troll video I made in the last day before AWA Pro 2022’s deadline.
I was inspired by a combination of the projector music box in the ending sequence from Sailor Moon R and the music box version of the theme from the PlayStation version of Chrono Trigger.
I bought a generic lift-top box from a craft store and created a wood-texture image of the Chrono Trigger logo in PhotoShop to print out and place in the box lid to serve as the “music box.”
The winding of the "box" was mimed, with the sound effect recorded from an actual music box I own.
Because the lid opened flat, I had to hide something behind the box to hold the lid about vertical after setting it on the table, so the reason my hands went out of frame after setting the box down was to hide the cut bit of video showing me place that brace behind the box before pulling my hands out of frame again. One the box was open, I left it open long enough for the song to play before closing it again.
Then I placed a deliberately low-quality pico projector on the table in place of the box and recorded it showing the animated loop of images from the game from the same camera position.
Once I had both sequences, it was a fairly simple task to mask the two pieces together. I did discover that at one point, I had accidentally leaned too far forward and my head had gotten in frame, but thankfully a second mask was able to hide that.
Since Pro is supposed to be blind, I even went so far as to take off my watch and wedding ring to hide my identity a bit better.
People in Pro were curious if the box was actually a projector or not, so this served its purpose. Probably not something I'll try again very soon, though.
Video - Original Short, Chrono Trigger PS1
Audio - Yasunori Mitsuda - Chrono and Marle (Arranged Version 1) (from Chrono Trigger)
Completed September 2021
I’ve been a fan of the .hack franchise since the very beginning, with .hack//SIGN, and I’ve wanted to make a video using the original quartet of games for quite a few years, but couldn’t find the right song.
A friend of mine suggested a song by Blackmore’s Night as a possibility, but it didn’t quite feel right to me. But the sound of the group definitely caught my ear, so I listened to a few of their albums to see what else they’d done, and stumbled across The Circle. I’d noticed as the various entries of the .hack franchise continued that there were a common group of plot beats that appeared as the setup and introduction for most of them, so the idea of a cyclical story using Aura as the viewpoint character for the song became the base of my idea for the video.
My original idea was to use all of the video incarnations of the story in chronological order (including SIGN, Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, Roots, and Quantum), but I realized that that would result in alternating between cel animation and CG for each entry in the series, so I decided to focus on the CG entries.
To get the footage, the G.U. movie and Beyond the World movie were easy (just ripping Blu-Rays), and the G.U. games thankfully had recently had a remastered re-release on Steam, so the video files were much easier to get than the PS2 versions would have been. The original games were much more difficult, since the cutscenes mostly weren’t stored as video files, but were rendered in-engine. To get them, I ended up using a PS2 emulator configured to upscale the raw frames and then dump them to a video file. Thankfully, I also had an Action Replay to copy my 100% complete file from my actual memory card to the emulator and unlock all of the cutscenes so I didn’t have to play through the whole series on the emulator (I had over 125 hours of play on the save file).
I also had to decide how to handle the various aspect ratios in the footage. Luckily, the three distinct periods of the video were all consistent with each other (the original games were 4:3, the G.U. movie and games were both 16:9, and the Beyond the World movie was 21:9), so I decided to keep each of them at their native ratios and animate letter/pillarboxing as needed to keep the video project at 16:9, which worked out pretty well, in my opinion.
Execution-wise, I think this video is pretty good, though the pacing, particularly of the first segment, could be better - it’s a rather slow introduction.
This got a decent reaction from several other editors in AWA Pro 2021, but ultimately didn’t receive any finals nominations.
Anime - .hack Franchise (.hack//INFECTION, .hack//MUTATION, .hack//OUTBREAK, .hack//QUARANTINE, .hack//G.U. Trilogy, .hack//G.U. Last Recode, .hack//Beyond the World
Audio - Blackmoor's Night - The Circle
Completed September 2021
This was my entry to the second half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix 2 event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the audio track (no video) and the title of the video to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.
I was given the audio and title from Opner’s Just the Good Times video, and I still had I Want to Eat Your Pancreas ripped from the first Iron Remix handy, so that’s what I went with as my combo, focussing on the happy moments of the movie and avoiding the heavier dramatic moments.
It was a fun one to make and came out pretty nicely, I think.
Anime - I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Audio - Ichika Nito - When you hit 1million subscribers
Completed July 2021
This was my entry to the first half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix 2 event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the audio track (no video) and the title of the video to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.
A conversation in Discord about Cool Runnings had had the track from the final run in the movie stuck in my head for several weeks, so I decided to do a sports video and chose the Battle Athletes OVA for my video source.
This was pretty rushed, even for an Iron Chef video, but I think it at least came out pretty coherently.
The audio and title were remixed in the second half of the event by Katranat for their video.
Anime - Battle Athletes OVA
Audio - Hans Zimmer - The Walk Home (from Cool Runnings)
Completed July 2021
This was my entry to the second half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the video track (no audio) and a theme to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.
I was given the video to Troubleclef’s “Battletits” and the theme of Action as the base for my video.
Since the source video was so short, I needed an even shorter piece of music, which took me quite a while to find. I ended up settling on a snippet from the soundtrack to The Wizard of Speed and Time.
It’s not my best work, but with the limited source and time, it still came out pretty well.
Anime - Keijo!
Audio - John Massari - Wizard Run (from The Wizard of Speed and Time)
Completed April 2021
This was my entry to the first half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the video track (no audio) and a theme to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.
The audio for this one was a lucky find. I had thrown every audio file on my computer under 3 minutes long onto a playlist to see what sparked inspiration, and on that list was a shortened version of Night Ranger’s “Goodbye” I had made back in 2013 for a possible AMV that I ended up never starting. Since the original version of the song is 4:30 long, it never would have been on the list of possibilities without that shortened version. I actually went back to the original and made a differently-shortened version for the video.
For the video, with the short time to edit, I wanted to use a movie to reduce the amount of scene hunting I’d have to do, and had recently rewatched I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, which fit very well with the mood of the song.
Overall, I like it, especially for an Iron Chef video made in about three hours.
It was eventually remixed in the second half of the event by Future_Vantas using the theme “Trailer” into their Love Story Trailer video.
Anime - I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Audio - Night Ranger - Goodbye
Completed March 2021
I usually really like the soundtracks to most Disney movies, but Olaf’s song in the original Frozen was one that I really didn’t like. When the sequel came out, I wasn’t looking forward to whatever song he was going to get, but I was very pleasantly surprised that it was actually quite fun.
Listening to the soundtrack without the movie, the first thing that popped into my head for Olaf’s terrified scream was Shinji’s similar scream in the fight against Ramiel, and the rest of the video grew from that one scene.
This has been my most successful video in contests in quite a few years, picking up several wins:
RICE 2021 - Winner, Sh*t’s Rough Award
Kumoricon 2021 - Winner, Best Guilty Pleasures
Anime Los Angeles 2022 - Winner, Best Comedy/Humor and Audience Choice
Anime - Neon Genesis Evangelion
Audio - Josh Gad - When I Am Older (from Frozen 2)
Completed February 2021
In August 2020, I lost my very elderly cat Crystal. A few months later, I was still badly missing her, and the AWA Pro deadline was approaching, so my brain started going to video ideas about cats. The idea that stuck out was Chi’s Sweet Home and how the kitten becomes a full member of the Yamada family. Pets truly are members of families, and losing one hurts just as much as losing a human member.
This is a simple and heartfelt video that has a lot of personal meaning to me, and I’m glad people seemed to pick up on that in the judging for AWA Pro 2020.
Anime - Chi's Sweet Home, Chi's New Address
Audio - Magome Togoshi - Kaisouroku (from Air)
Completed October 2020